THE SHIPIKISHA CLUB

222pp., paperback, First South African Edition, Jacana Media, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781431437160

First Published in the UK in 2026. 

A novel about marriage, motherhood and the devastating cost of silence, set in contemporary Zambia.

Sali, a working mother of three, is on trial for the murder of her husband. Accused of shooting him after a fight in their bedroom, she pleads not guilty. But her story begins fourteen years earlier with a different kind of violence - the pressure to conform, to endure, to 'shipikisha' 

“In The Shipikisha Club, Kalimamukwento creates an unflinching account of the myriad forms of intimate violence and betrayal within a patriarchal system, interspersed with moments of startling tenderness. She rejects moral certitude, instead pulling us into the minds of messy, complex women attempting to survive and connect in an unjust world. Kalimamukwento vividly renders the daily indignities of familial spaces with perfectly calibrated prose, every word uncompromising and honest, until the emotional and physical geography of these homes are seared into our brains.”Sarah Yahm, author of Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation

 "The Shipikisha Club is electric. From the very first page I was pulled into the worlds of Ntashé and her mother. This is a book where the passages, full of beautifully spare, sharp words, are there to serve the story of relationships put to severe tests." Farah Ali, author of The River, the Town

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian writer and criminal lawyer. Her debut novel, The Mourning Bird, won the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award. Her short story collection, Obligations to the Wounded, received the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She holds an MFA from Hamline University and lives in Minnesota, USA.